| T.S.Eliot (1888 -1965) is one of the most influential English poets and literary critics in the twentieth century, the forefather of the Anglo-American New Criticism. His reinterpretation of "tradition" is epoch-making; his anti-romantic idea of "depersonalization" and the notion of "objective correlative" are revolutionary in both literary criticism and poetry writing. Heated discussions and researches on his poetry and a series of literary criticism theories are still going on nowadays. However, we tend to analyze his literary works and theories separately, which either affects our full understanding or leads to misunderstanding of his works. In fact, the author's artistic ideology is inevitably connected with his writing process. In other words, the literary works are the embodiment or elaboration of the author's literary theories. As is written in the preface to The Great Tradition, "the major figures (such as Coleridge and T.S.Eliot) in the history of literary criticism have also handed down their literary works. They are critics as well as poets. People believe their judgments because of admiring their poetry. " Therefore, this paper tries to explore T.S.Eliot's literary theory mainly articulated in his critical work Tradition and the Individual Talent, and have a look at his combination of theory and practice through his early poem "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" (Abbreviated as "The Love Song" in the following) . Mainly based on the New Criticism approach, especially the method of "close reading" when exploring the poem, the paper tries to point out that the three important notions of "tradition", "objective correlative" and "depersonalization" are the guidance to his own practice in the writing of "The Love Song". And "The Love Song " is an elaboration of his theory. Of course these notions are interconnected and intermingled in the poem. Only when we take an overall view and combine his theory with his works in the reading can we understand Eliot's works better.
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